


Shadow

by republica



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics)
Genre: AU, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-05
Updated: 2012-04-05
Packaged: 2017-11-03 02:53:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/republica/pseuds/republica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mental Hospital AU. They give him drugs, which he doesn’t take. Instead he smokes endless cigarettes on the small porch, holding hands with Natasha. They don’t speak, much. She tells him, whispering directly into his ear, that they can hear everything, and they will find her. He doesn’t say anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> Some mentions of violence. I freely admit to not knowing what goes on in an institution, or anything specific about mental illness, so I took large liberties. Please don't be offended if my depictions are not realistic.

The first person Bucky meets at the Blake Institute is a schizophrenic redhead who tells him in great detail about her incarceration in an underground Soviet training camp. Her name is Natasha, but she tells him not to call her that in case they find him and ask about her. “Call me Widow,” she whispers in his ear. Then she turns and walks away. 

His roommate is named Sam, who tells him how he jumped off a roof because they said he could fly. He won’t say who they are, but he has conversations with the air as if someone will hear. Besides that, he’s all right. Bucky wonders if they paired them together cause they were both in the military. 

He gets propositioned by a brunette named Jessica, and refuses. She then bursts into tears and tells him it’s not her fault; that she doesn’t want to attract that kind of attention, forgetting she was the instigator of their interaction. He awkwardly pats her on the back, but then she tries to kiss him and he has to leave. Sam tells him later that she’s a nymphomaniac. 

There’s a man called Tony who sits in the corner of the patient lounge, reciting strings of numbers and writing them over and over, then suddenly ripping all the pages up and beginning again. Occasionally, he’ll put a red bucket on his head and rock back and forth for hours. 

The first time he wakes up drenched in sweat, clutching his own head hard enough to bruise, he doesn’t know where to go. There are shadows at the corner of his eyes and if he looks too closely they make menacing faces. On duty, he’d shoot things or talk to Steve. Back at his dingy apartment in the city, he would go to the bar and drink and fight until they went away, but Sam seems hard to provoke to violence. 

Instead, he goes out into the lounge, and finds Natasha sitting on one of the ugly couches with clashing stripes. She looks at him, but her gaze has no focus. The TV plays silently in the background as they sit, casting strange shapes onto the wall. It is eerily quiet, and the pressure behind his eyes builds again. The shadows on the wall twist into people he used to know. He wants to hit something, anything to distract him from the pressure and the smells and the silence. 

Natasha takes his hand and holds it up to hers. Her fingers are small and her hand is soft.

 

He meets with Doctor Blake, who asks him uncomfortable questions about the war, and he unconsciously rubs his arm where he took the bullet. They’d told him he might lose the limb, but in the end it was saved. It still aches sometimes. Blake tells him about PTSD and survivor’s guilt and other things he doesn’t want to hear. 

He finds out that Sam’s voices are birds, but manages to escape before being introduced to each one. Sam says the birds know what happened to him, and the pity in his eyes makes Bucky turn away. Jessica tells him how she can’t control her effect on people, how they all look at her all the time. She says she can feel the weight of their eyes on her all the time. Then she tries to stick her hand in his pants. 

They give him drugs, which he doesn’t take. Instead he smokes endless cigarettes on the small porch, holding hands with Natasha. They don’t speak, much. She tells him, whispering directly into his ear, that they can hear everything, and they will find her. He doesn’t say anything. 

Tony gets worse, writing more numbers then angrily scribbling them out. He tries to write them on his skin, but the orderlies wrest the marker from him and he screams, until they bring him the bucket and he can sit. 

After a month the pressure builds again behind his eyes. The shadows dance outside the window and he sees them when he’s eating and when he’s sleeping and he punches through the window, shredding his hand and earning him a stern talk from Doctor Blake. He feels like a child, recoiling from the Doctor’s stern face. The cuts fade, joining the many other scars that litter his body. His dreams get worse, as he remembers fire and panic and terror. Sam has to shake him awake and he runs out onto the porch, where Natasha sits. He wonders if she ever sleeps. He wonders about her shadows.

Tony disappears the next month and his bucket lies forlornly on the ground in the sitting room. They get a new patient, Peter, who twitches when you look at him and tells them all about the spiders that crawl in his ears and eat his brain.

That night Natasha comes to his room and they lie next to each other and he breathes in her hair and she tells him that if he wants they can escape together, that they’ve found her and she has to go and she shakes and he holds her until they fall asleep, but when he wakes up she’s back on the porch with a cigarette and he wonders if he dreamt it.

Doctor Blake asks him why he drove his motorcycle into a river and he stares and remembers how the water tasted like blood as it filled his lungs and the shadows left him alone for a few blessed minutes. 

His dreams are full of water and fire intertwining as he hears screams of pain from all sides, sees desperate eyes wide with shock, pools of blood and sharp gunfire. Voices he once knew call his name and he can’t move, can only watch as they fall. He takes a bullet to the arm every night and when he dies he wakes up, panting. 

Jessica stops trying to seduce him, and is let out, and she smiles sadly as she walks away. Instead, they meet Wanda who killed her children and says they were kidnapped, and asks, every time, has anyone seen them? 

There were children in the shadows and he remembers them, and his fingers shake around his cigarette and Natasha puts her hand over his and he whispers, quietly, that they were only children. She nods gravely, and tells him she was married, once, until they took her away. 

He remembers Steve, and how he’d listen when it got to be too much, and he remembers his face in that last minute, after his shoulder exploded and he can see Steve telling him it would be fine, and then he’s gone, too. He wonders if any of the pieces of his friend are still ground into his skin and he rubs his arm and takes a drag of his cigarette.

It’s worst when he can recognize the shadows and see every face, young or old, familiar or strange, staring at him blankly. He tries to ignore them but they won’t go.

He eats lunch with Peter and listens to his rambling about eight armed men and his favorite comics and feels old, although they’re only years apart. Sam sits on his right grinning at the space next to his ear. The light shines through the windows casting patterns on the dull plastic table, and Bucky wonders how he ended up here. 

**Author's Note:**

> Re: Jessica - I figured that her powers, with the pheromones attracting men, could equate to nymphomania, but where she thinks men are overly interested in her. I've no idea if this is possible, and was not trying to demean her in any way. I love Spider-woman!


End file.
